Research

Good decisions need good evidence. I help organizations understand how their people, culture, and communities are actually experiencing their work, and I turn that understanding into clear findings and practical next steps. With more than 25 years of social science research experience, 70+ peer-reviewed publications, and projects in 16 countries, I design, conduct, and report on research that fits your questions, your timeline, and your context. I also chair doctoral research in leadership and serve as editor-in-chief of a top-tier peer-reviewed academic journal, so the rigor behind your results is built in.

Listen to people: interviews, focus groups, surveys, and questionnaires
Observe how work really happens: ethnographic methods, participant observation, social network analysis
Analyze what’s written and said: policies, communications, and conversations, through thematic, discourse, narrative, corpus, and values analysis
Work alongside community: participatory action research, case studies, and literature reviews

Every project begins by clarifying the questions, so the methods fit the problem and not the other way around. The process we usually work on together is 1) a scoping conversation, 2) research design and plan, 3) data collection, and 4) findings and recommendations. All projects follow established research ethics standards, with confidentiality and data security built into the design.

Deliverables may include written reports, data dashboards, live or online presentations, and tailored workshops to put the findings into practice.

Example 1: Community Based Participatory Research

Do you find you have a community based challenge that you need to investigate? I can help clarify the questions, conduct literature reviews to understand the complexity of factors shaping your system, pursue participatory action research in which stakeholders and participants are involved to understand the context and co-create solutions, or conduct values analysis in order to explore common ground and divergent perspectives to shape policy, procedures and practices that begin to address an ongoing challenge.

Example 2: workplace Culture and Well-Being

Do you need to understand and shift your workplace culture so that it better reflects your organization’s purpose and strategy? Through holistic social and behavioral research, I offer qualitative and quantitative research to help you identify areas for change and propose concrete steps to maximize your workplace well-being and expertise.

For example, by performing and synthesizing information from 1:1 interviews or small group focus group conversations, I can help you better understand your team’s behaviors that are impacting collaborations and relationships. Through design and implementation of surveys, I can support your need for anonymized and expansive data collection. Through thematic analysis of written policies, I can show how your current systems create your organizational life. Through social network analysis, I can help you maximize team workflows, identify gaps in process, suggest strategic employee hires, and show how team dynamics and innovation show who you are and the value you bring to your clients or communities. Through ethnographic methods, I can help articulate how your physical spaces, nonverbal communication, and other community practices are hindering your goals or speeding your vision for who you want to be.

Example 3: Organizational listening Appraisal

Listening shapes how information, ideas, and concerns move through an organization. An organizational listening appraisal looks at how well your leaders, teams, and stakeholders actually listen to one another, and where the gaps are. I gather data and perspectives across your organization, from individual teams to the whole system, and show you concrete ways to strengthen the culture you want.

I can help you see your listening cultural health through questionnaires with internal and external stakeholders, quantitative corpus linguistics and qualitative values analysis of your policies and procedures, ethnographic methods and participatory action research that probe deeply into your group’s cultural ways of being, critical-cultural study to better understand how power and status impact listening flows, and many other mixed method social scientific and humanities based approaches to inquiry to describe your unique listening culture.

These are just a few of the research Design opportunities that I offer.

What Research Clients Say:

Great data and report. A+++.

“In addition to having a stellar record in research project management, Liz is a gifted leader and org/system developer. She is also one of the most organized and efficient people I know (both as a researcher and leader), and an outstanding writer.”

“She’s really excellent at reframing a topic or question and shedding new light on an issue that cuts to the heart of various challenges we’re expressing.”

“She has pushed my thinking as much as anyone I have worked with. Her DEIJ lens, passion for academics, eye for systems, creativity around structure and generally intuitive take on things has been a real gift to our team.”